Habits 101: Techniques and Research

A Primer on Modeling, Creating, and Breaking Habits

WTF Is Rationality?

[This section first starts off with a quick intro to what rationality is. We go over the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality.]

This is a book on getting your shit together.

Attractor Theory

[Attractor Theory is a hybrid model that tries to reconcile the effects of internal and external factors on motivation. It suggests that an important additional consideration in decision-making is how the action affects your ability to take future actions.]

Planning 101

[This section goes over the planning fallacy, our cognitive bias of making overconfident predictions in our time estimates. It starts with an overview of the field and moves into some models of how human planning works. We’ll move into three techniques to plan better and end with some more practical…

Starting Advice:

[This section goes over four things that are important to keep in mind before we start the other stuff — caring about the obvious, looking for practical things, practicing well, and realistic expectations.]

In Defense of the Obvious:

Interlude 2

This Interlude once again goes over two additional ideas that are separate from the well-researched stuff: There Is No Akrasia and Recovering from Failure.

I actually think they’re cooler than the stuff in Interlude 1, and I hope you enjoy them as well.

mindlevelup: The Book | Table of Contents

Overview of this book:

Closing Disclaimer

After reading through all of this rationality stuff, you might be feeling very excited to go out and try some of this stuff out. You might think about imposing this rationality stuff upon many areas of your life.

Interlude 1

Here, we’ll cover two additional concepts: Acting into Uncertainty and Fading Novelty.

They’re both pretty cool, and I think they help give additional support for the mindset I’m trying to point at with these essays.

Acting into Uncertainty:

Introduction

Hello there!

This is the introduction, where I explain why I wanted to start this project and what you’ll hopefully get out of it.

This whole thing started out as a way to do better than most of the stuff out there in the self-help field.